The game of jailbreak cat-and-mouse has never been quicker. Thanks to Chinese jailbreaking teams like Pangu, the slow, careful back and forth between jailbreak teams cracking open iOS, and Apple patching it, has hit breakneck speeds.
Case in point? A week after Apple released iOS 8.4.1, closing a security hole that allowed iOS 8.4 to be jailbroken, Pangu is already showing off a jailbreak solution for it.
Over the weekend, the Pangu jailbreak team demonstrated a way to jailbreak iOS 8.4.1. It’s just a proof-of-concept right now, which means it may not make it to release, especially for such an incremental iOS update (and one that is about to be followed by iOS 9 in just a month.)
Yet you never know. Jailbreak teams used to store up their exploits, only releasing them to the public every six months to a year. The idea was that jailbreakable exploits were valuable gems, not to be squandered on small iOS releases. But the dominance of Chinese jailbreaking teams has devalued the currency of exploits. They seem to be popped into the wild as soon as they are found.
Depending on how you want to look at it, it means we’re either in a golden age of jailbreaking, or a wild west of jailbreaking. Either way, it might be coming to an end. iOS 9 incorporates a new feature called ‘Rootless’ which is said to make jailbreaking drastically harder. Could iOS 9 lead to a slower jailbreak pace?
Source: Weibo
Via: ModMyi
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
One response to “iOS 8.4.1 jailbreak could be incoming”
All Apple has to do is make downloading (i.e. safari down-loader) more open and robust (a la Os X) and I’d be less apt to jailbreak. I can get V-Share, Movie Box and some other non-sanctioned apps w/o a jailbreak and more and more Cydia features are being incorporated into iOS with each iteration. Although unlimited customization, convenient tweaks and free-tethering are cool- I’m not sure its now worth the crashing, slowing and illegitimacy that comes along with it. Not to mention I can’t use my work email (Good for Enterprise) as xCon and the other jailbreak-masking solutions haven’t worked for a few versions now.